Yo word up - 1974 Nixon was president when this painting was created. It's old , I was 30 that Christmas. It was the painting in the Artpolice's early years, when I was insane half the time. Artpolicecomics was my most insane creation but this painting was also a big factor nearly 2 years making this huge fucker. It's 8 X 7' that is 56 sq. feet covered with tiny hand man images in hundreds and hundreds of colors. I remember when I showed this painting to my friend Joe Zucker it upset him, it was too much outside what was the way things were then in fine art contemporary arts it was too many options it was the most discersive painting ever in a sense it's painting outside of sane precincts ( as in the art of the insane). But my mental disorder somehow was undoing my art, it was as if after that point I could always use the excuse that I was after all insane. The hospitalisations endless visits with psychiatrists render me now as a sane-enough person to be allowed my native freedoms. It's interesting to me how small children respond to my earlier painting when I was sliding in and out of my bi-polar psychosis. Often the most beautiful of these paintings were made in lucid periods of recovery moving away from self-destructive periods of depressive manias. I did a different sort of art when I was unwell, more collage and more violent ( I cut paintings up in anger more than once). Point being the painting in the Walker Art Center collection is the painting that is most disturbing to me because it represents my transit from sanity to insanity. It's a painting that gets sick. The painting that belongs to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is the recovery picture the utopia little children see in colors and cartoons boundless and too many too count...
( now in storage @ 2400 Third Ave. So.Mpls. MN 55404USA ) Untitled (for John and Alice) 1975 - J.Shinder donor ( I gave the big painting to Walker (the sick painting) in Midnite Party Gallery gallery 5 )- I needed a place to store the elephant.